Wednesday 2 December 2009 19.05 EST
First published on Wednesday 2 December 2009 19.05 EST

In a bold move, Victoria Derbyshire's FiveLive show came live from Zimbabwe yesterday – capitalising on the recent lifting of a ban on foreign journalists.

After a bumpy start in which a student unionist and a democracy activist both spoke in a monotone that was hard to engage with, the pace picked up with pre-recorded reports. In a supermarket, Derbyshire found women thanking god that the shelves were now full. "Is it only down to god, nothing to do with politics?" she queried. Mainly god, came the answer. A professor from the University of Zimbabwe was more analytical. "There is no genuine power-sharing," he said crisply. "The government of national unity is stuck in the mud."

Even more stark was an interview with Edith, a Movement for Democratic Change party worker, who was recently attacked in the street by men wielding AK-47s. She wept as she spoke of her certainty that they wanted to kill her.

The show really lit up at the end when two Zimbabweans in Britain, Chendai and Conrad, rang in. Chendai said she felt the British stance on Zimbabwe "makes a farce of us being a British colony. Nobody is standing up against Mugabe and what he's doing to our country." Conrad disagreed. "It's time Zimbabweans did something for themselves," he said. "It's time for us to make our country great."

There was no time for further exploration, but the show had done a great job of bringing to life what life in Zimbabwe is now like.